Raeder claimed to be ignorant of the plans for a putsch, but in the days preceding the putsch, Trotha and Raeder had been in close contact with General Walther von Lüttwitz ( the real leader of the Kapp putsch ) and the Freikorps leader Captain Hermann Ehrhardt.

This incident received much sensationalized and exaggerated press coverage in Germany where it was claimed that an attempted mutiny had occurred on the Emden, and which Raeder apparently took more seriously than he did the reports from his own officers.

In April 1932, when the Defence Minister General Wilhelm Groener decided to ban the SA as a threat to public order, Raeder strenuously objected to the ban, arguing that it was the Reichsbanner and the rest of the left-wing paramilitary groups that should be banned instead, and claimed right-wing paramilitary groups like the SA were essential to save Germany from Communism.

At the same time, Raeder worked to promote National Socialist ideology as opposed to the NSDAP in the Navy, ordering in September 1936 that all officers read a tract by Kriegsmarine Commander Siegfried Sorge called Der Marineoffizier about what it took to be a good officer., Sorge had claimed that one could not be a good naval officer without believing in National Socialist values.

Raeder later claimed when on trial for his life at Nuremberg that the Hossbach conference was a flight of fancy on Hitler's part that nobody took seriously, and he did not object because there was nothing to object to.

Raeder later claimed during his testimony at Nuremberg and in his memoirs to have been opposed to the denunciation of the A. G. N. A., which he claimed to have been kept in the dark about, but contemporary evidence from 1939, not the least Raeder's own role as the author of the Z Plan suggests otherwise.

In a speech in early January 1943, Raeder called World War II an ideological war, praised National Socialism for its " moral strength ", and claimed that only through National Socialist indoctrination could the war be won.

In his report to Hitler about Weserübung, Raeder claimed that the success of the operation was " undoubtedly largely " the work of the capital ships, and argued that the campaign in Norway had " amply confirmed the soundness " ( emphasis in the original ) of the construction policies of the 1930s that favoured capital ships over U-boats and carriers.

After the North Cape raid, Raeder blamed Marschall for the damage that Scnarnorst and Gneisenau had endured, claimed that Marschall had failed to understand his orders for Operation Juno properly, and sacked him.

The Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wanted Raeder and the other high officials of the " grocery ring " like Wilhelm Keitel, Hermann Göring and Hans Lammers who used their positions to ignore rationing when grocery shopping to be punished in order to let the German people know that the elite were suffering like everyone else, but Hitler claimed if the German people learned of the luxurious lifestyles of the elite in the middle of a war that the effect would be fatal to morale.

Raeder claimed in his 1957 memoirs Mein Leben that he had first learned that the regime in which he served so long was a criminal regime in March 1945 when he visited his old colleague, the former Defence Minister Otto Gessler in a hospital when he was recovering from the torture he received in a concentration camp.

Raeder claimed that he was not involved in a conspiracy to commit aggression because Hitler's statements in the Hossbach Memorandum of 1937 and again to senior officers including Raeder for plans for a war with Poland in May and August 1939 together with Raeder's own statements to Hitler about seizing Norway in October – November 1939 were all just mere talk that was not to be taken seriously.

Raeder claimed that he had been " very indignant " about his government's claim that Britain had sunk the Athenia, which led Maxwell Fyfe to remark that he had done nothing to express that " indignation ", just as he claimed to have been angry about the false charges of homosexuality against Werner von Fritsch, where he had also done nothing after Fritsch had been cleared.

When questioned by Maxwell Fyfe about the Libau massacres, Raeder claimed that he no idea about what had happened, and maintained that he would have stopped the massacres had he known.

Finally, Raeder claimed that Dönitz was unqualified to become Commander-in-Chief of the Navy in 1943, and that Dönitz was only appointed to that position because Hitler preferred an unqualified " Hitler-boy " like Dönitz to qualified officers like himself.

Dönitz was savage in his relentless attacks against Raeder for his " policy of bloated surface vessels " and for not spending enough money on building U-boats in the 1930s, a policy that Dönitz claimed had cost him victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.

In a 1950 interview, Erika Raeder claimed that her septuagenarian husband was forced to do brutal " hard labour " in Spandau when Raeder's job in Spandau was to work in the prison library.

In another interview in 1951, Erika Raeder claimed that :" The treatment we Germans had to endure is worse than anything that happened to the Jews ".

Erika Raeder's campaign to free her husband was joined by German veterans, who bombarded the American, British and French governments with demands that Raeder, who they claimed was an innocent man wrongly convicted at Nuremberg, be freed.

" In an interview in November 1950, Admiral Hanson claimed that American and other United Nations commanders fighting in the Korean War would have been convicted of aggression if the same standards that were applied to Raeder applied to them.

| 75px < div style =" clear: left "> Erich Raeder </ div >|| G || G || G |||-|| Life Imprisonment || Commander In Chief of the Kriegsmarine from 1928 until his retirement in 1943, succeeded by Dönitz.

Raeder led the Kriegsmarine ( German Navy ) for the first half of the war ; he resigned in 1943 and was replaced by Karl Dönitz.

The German historian Jost Dülffer wrote that Raeder would have been better off in preparing the Z Plan with following the advice of Commander Hellmuth Heye who had advocated in a 1938 paper a guerre-de-course strategy of Kreuzerkrieg ( cruiser war ) in which groups of Panzerschiffe and submarines would attack British convoys or Karl Dönitz who also advocated a guerre-de-course strategy of using " wolf-packs " of submarines to attack British commerence.

In July 1939, Raeder told Karl Dönitz that his fears of a general war were groundless, and told him he take the entire summer off for a vacation.

Under the leadership of Raeder and even more so under his successor Karl Dönitz, it was official policy for naval courts-martial to impose the death penalty as often as possible, no matter how slight the offence, so that the sailors would fear their officers more than the enemy.

In general, officers who were in some way critical of Hitler's military, if not necessarily political leadership, such as Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt and Admiral Raeder, received ( and accepted ) larger bribes than officers who were well known to be convinced National Socialists, such as General Walter Model, Admiral Karl Dönitz and Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner.

In September 1941, Raeder and the U-boat commander Karl Dönitz presented Hitler with plans for all-out U-boat offensive intended to destroy both the United States Navy and Merchant Marine.

As the U-boats continued to be the arm of the Kriegsmarine that was doing most of the fighting, by 1942 Raeder was becoming increasingly overshadowed by Admiral Karl Dönitz, who made little secret of his contempt for the " battleship admiral " Raeder, and started to act more and more independently, for instance, dealing directly with Albert Speer in settling construction targets for the U-boats.

Dönitz had little respect for " old navy " admirals like Raeder, whom he accused of being more interested in a building a great fleet after the war than in actually winning the war.

By early 1942, Raeder and Dönitz were openly feuding with each other, with Dönitz mocking Raeder's obsession with " dinosaurs ", as Dönitz called battleships, and Raeder complaining of Dönitz's massive ego and his tendency to run the U-boat arm as it were his own private navy.

Dönitz harboured enormous resentment against Raeder for starving the U-boat arm of funds before the war in order to concentrate on building battleships.

Raeder and Dönitz constantly fought over what was the proper use of the U-boats, namely to win the " tonnage war " by sinking as much as tonnage as possible, as Dönitz wanted, or win the " commerce war " by denying the Allies use of certain waterways like the North Cape route to the Soviet Union as Raeder favoured.

Dönitz, as a follower of the guerre de course theories of Théophile Aube, was interested in doing as much damage to the enemy merchant fleets as possible whereas Raeder, as a follower of Mahan.

In late 1942, in an attempt to limit Dönitz's power and cut down his " vanity ", Raeder took away responsibility for training U-boat crews from Dönitz, only to see Dönitz ignore his orders.

Dönitz informed Raeder that he was disregarding that order and he would continue to train crews for " his " U-boats.

The German navy thus ignored Beatty's request that its Commander-in-Chief, Erich Raeder, attend his funeral – as Raeder had done at Jellicoe's funeral earlier.

* German leadership rejected Hartenstein's cease fire proposal, partly because Admiral Raeder did not think it wise to enter into a " deal " with the Allies, nothing was to interfere with Eisbär's surprise attack on Cape Town to strike at the supplies destined for the British and Soviets, and Hitler had directed that no word of Laconias sinking or the proposed Axis rescue be transmitted to the Allies, though subordinates ignored Hitler's orders and communicated messages to the Allies about the proposed rescue attempt.

Admiral Raeder was strongly opposed to Sea Lion since the almost entire Kriegsmarine surface fleet had been either sunk or badly damaged in Weserübung, and therefore his service was hopelessly outnumbered by the ships of the Royal Navy.

This ultimately placed responsibility for Sea Lion's success squarely on the shoulders of Raeder and Göring, neither of whom had the slightest enthusiasm for the venture and, in fact, did little to hide their opposition to it.

Another major influence on Raeder was his close friend Admiral Adolf von Trotha who had commanded the " Detached Division " of the Navy before 1914 and often taken the " Detached Division " on long voyages into the Atlantic.

For Raeder, the idea that all of the suffering and sacrifice of the Great War, which had affected him personally was all in vain was unthinkable, and he become obsessed with making certain that Germany would one day obtain the " world power status " that the Reichs leaders had sought, but failed to achieve in the Great War.

For Raeder as for other naval officers, the defeat of 1918 was especially humiliating because under the charismatic leadership of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the Naval State Secretary from 1897-1917, the Navy had been promoted as the service which would give Germany the " world power status " that her leaders craved, and to that end, vast sums of money had been spent in the Anglo-German naval race before 1914.

As soon as they learned that Berlin had been occupied by Marinebrigade Ehrhardt on the morning of 13 March 1920, Trotha and Raeder issued a proclamation declaring that the Weimar Republic had ended, declared their loyalty to Kapp " government ", and ordered the Navy to seize Wilhelmshaven and Kiel for the putsch.

On 18 March 1920 when Raeder's close friend, Admiral Magnus von Levetzow who had seized Kiel proposed a march on Berlin with the aim of deposing the government after the failure of the putsch in Berlin, Raeder declared his intention of joining Levetzow, only to change his mind a few hours later, and hastily called the Defence Minister Gustav Noske to tell him he had been " misunderstood " about joining Levetzow on his proposed march.

Raeder and Wegener were once friends, having began their careers as ensigns in 1894 abroad the cruiser Deutschland, but their differing concepts of future strategy turned them into the most bitter of enemies, and the two officers were to spent much of the 1920s waging a war in print over what the Navy should or should not had done in the First World War and what were the correct lessons of the recent conflict for the future.

In private, Raeder was prepared to admit that Tirpitz had made mistakes, but to do so publicly was anathema to him as would mean damaging the mystique of the " Tirpitz cult " that Raeder believed essential to maintain the prestige of the Navy.

Raeder testified that he had frequently violated the Versailles treaty, but denied any intention of aggressive war.

Raeder was keenly aware that the Army was the senior service and that many in Germany took the view that because the great High Seas Fleet that Tirpitz had built had done almost nothing in World War I that it would be a waste of money and time to attempt to rebuilt Tirpitz's fleet.

Raeder did not care for the " pocket battleships " programme that had been launched in 1928, and much preferred to build large capital ships.

Raeder only supported the " pocket battleships " as a way of keeping German shipyards busy and as the only way of improving the naval budget until such time as Germany would overthrow the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, and start building capital ships that Versailles had outlawed.